Please note that the laws conveyed are the views of the authorities cited in each post, but other authorities may disagree. Please check with your halachic authority.

All points of view are welcome in this forum, if expressed civilly. For personal manifestos, please start your own blog.

Monday, October 19, 2009

Choosing a Haftorah

Hi,

Today our Haftarot are ordained by custom and printed in our chumashim, but it was not always so; there were guidelines for selecting a Haftorah, and a community could choose any prophetic passage that matched those guidelines.

One such rule is that on a week with a double Torah portion, the Haftorah's theme must match a theme from the second portion. Similarly, on a week when we read from a single Torah the Haftorah was supposed to match a theme from the end (maftir) part of the Torah reading.